Sunday, August 11, 2013

The Great Twitter Myth: Working Class People Don't Tweet - Federal Election Day 7

By Darryl Mason

The Liberal Party of Australia Facebook page smells a social media conspiracy.

If the Liberal Party has got this wrong - raising suspicion of naughty social media pranking or sabotage by Labor - they will look like idiots who don't know how social media works.

The Mystery Followers panic spreads to Twitter:

The Herald Sun is onto it:

News Corp Australia has scrutinised a sample of last 100 recent accounts
to "follow" Mr Abbott. Ninety-nine are questionable - having either
tweeted no more than once, tweeted in at least three languages, tweeted
non-sentences, are based in foreign countries, or have no more than a
single follower.

One possible, and more likely, explanation than Labor Party activists buying fake followers for Tony Abbott (why exactly?) is Abbott's Twitter account is now a highly placed Recommended Follow for those opening new Twitter accounts in Australia, and internationally. Being a recommended follow immediately sees your following ranks swelled by fake, spam accounts that auto-follow those recommended by Twitter.

Whatever the truth behind it, social media will be well and truly thrust into the Federal Election 2013 spotlight next week, where, presumably, many old and threatened mainstream media figures will try to hose down how much of an influence social media will have on election outcomes.

Meanwhile, the Australian sounds more threatened than ever by social media, Twitter in particular, and has to resort to quoting a Boomer generation Liberal Party advisor, who doesn't even use Twitter, to fill out its 'Real Australians Don't Tweet' agenda. Embarrassing :

To deliver another term of government, Mr Rudd needs to connect
with voters in marginal working-class seats such as Lindsay and Greenway
in western Sydney and Forde and Longman on Brisbane's southern and
northern outskirts. These are traditional Labor-voting electorates now
out in the wilderness but critical to ALP success.
Mr Rudd must
reach out to undecided voters in these seats and bring them back into
the Labor fold. Social media seems an unlikely strategy to achieve this.

The question is, will Mr
Rudd's 1.3 million followers on Twitter help him win over voters
against Tony Abbott's 151,875 followers?

Grahame Morris, federal
director of Barton Deakin Government Relations and a former Liberal
Party adviser and campaigner, thinks not.

"The campaign team that
focuses its efforts on winning the twitterverse will wake up the day
after polling very disappointed," Mr Morris said.

"They will
have missed the target and the target is undecided and uncommitted
voters who are most certainly not rushing to their iPhones over their
Coco Pops to see what Kevin Rudd is tweeting, or anyone else for that
matter."

Mr Morris thinks it will be the next election or the one
after that will ultimately be determined through social-media
campaigns.

There you have it. The Australian extensively quotes someone who thinks social media won't impact on federal elections until 2016...or 2019!